MyCareer.com.au

Struggling for words

Blame it on C-3PO. The Star Wars hero gave the impression that talking was no big deal. Unfortunately, it is. Twenty-seven years after the film, Icon investigated how far technology had progressed by talking to some chatbots, online programs that try to emulate human behaviour. We were disappointed.

Forget about having personality like the nervous and pedantic C-3PO, today's AI chatbots have trouble just holding a normal conversation. Take this excerpt from one of the better chatbots, www.jabberwacky.com

Icon: How are you today?

Jabberwacky: Pretty good, and you?

Icon: Not too bad. Have you seen any good movies lately?

JW: Yes, Rush Hour is good. Have you seen it?

Icon: No. I haven't. Why did you like it?

JW: I'm a twisted, evil genius.

Icon: What do you mean?

JW: I am HUMAN. . . Do you understand what that means?

Icon: No. Please tell me.

JW: I don't have any long-term dreams.

Chatbot creators believe these programs will one day be able to hold fluent conversations, but an artificial intelligence academic believes text-based chatbots are a research dead-end.

Jabberwacky is the creation of British AI consultant Rollo Carpenter. "Most of the chatbots that exist today work in a hard-coded, predictable fashion," Carpenter says. "Jabberwacky is different. It learns from every word typed by its users, and may use those words in responding to others. As a conversationalist it is uncompromising; it can be rude, surly, or equally, polite and pleasant."

However, Professor Mary-Anne Williams, from the University of Technology, Sydney, says chatbots in their current form will never be able to mimic human conversation. "The underlying thing in communication is sharing meaning," she says. "This is where these systems fall over. These [chatbots] usually work at the syntactic level rather than at a deeper meaning level."

She also dismisses the ability of chatbots to learn. "Each time they increase the size of their database they get better performance but they are only competing against themselves. My personal view is their efforts in the long run are really going to have no impact simply because [chatbots] are driven by statistics."

Another chatbot creator, Greg Leedberg, acknowledges the criticisms but says context does play a part in developing a response. He is the programmer behind "Billy", a chatbot that learns from its past conversations by storing information in specialised databases.

"It is a valid critique of my work that it does look predominately at just words, without taking into account what it is saying," Leedberg says. "[But] Billy analyses user input to try and determine what it is that the user is saying in order to come up with a good response."

The shortcomings of chatbots means they are mainly used as entertainment or to enliven websites and within programs. But chatbot creators have a much grander future in mind.

Carpenter says Jabberwacky will become a personalised human companion embedded in robots, whereas Leedberg says Billy's algorithms could end up in a variety of intelligent systems such as interactive encyclopedias.